Books published by University of Illinois Press

Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place."Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to "post-racial" America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women's homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.

Language is a fundamental tool for shaping identity and community, including the expression (or repression) of sexual desire. This book investigates the tensions and adaptations that occur when processes of globalization bring one system of gay or lesbian language into contact with another.

A collection of poems imitating the styles of the Romantics and the Victorians.

The history of unemployment and concepts surrounding it remain a mystery to many Americans. This introduction takes an aim at misinformation, willful deceptions, and popular myths to set the record straight, providing a roadmap to better jobs and economic security.

Women of color from diverse backgrounds give frank, unapologetic accounts of their battles to navigate grad school and fulfill their ambitions. Their stories of hard-won successes are sprinkled with advice on self-care, building supportive communities, finding like-minded mentors, and resisting unsupportive faculty and colleagues.

Twentieth-century composers created thousands of original works for solo percussion and percussion ensemble. In this concise book, percussionist Thomas Siwe offers an essential and much-needed survey of groundbreaking musical literature.

Focusing on C P Cavafy's intriguing and idiosyncratic work, this book offers an interdisciplinary study of the construction of (homo)erotic desire in poetry in terms of metonymic discourse and anti-economic libidinal modalities.

From fan dancers to fan belts--the compelling, untold stories of Chicago's 1933 world fair--abundantly illustrated with colour and black-and-white photographs

This fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony's political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. The magazine's status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present.

Seeking to historicize today's "Great Recession," this volume includes essays that uses examples from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to situate the current economic crisis and its impact on workers in the context of previous abrupt shifts in the modern-day capitalist marketplace.

The first-ever study of Mexican-descent Catholicism in the city, this title illuminates a previously unexplored facet of the urban past and provides present-day lessons for American communities undergoing ethnic integration and succession.

A critical assessment of collective memories, small world stories, and other allegories of everyday life